Saturn is truly the Sci-Fi system. It has a Death Star (Mimas), several UFOs (Pan and Daphnis and presumably Atlas and S/2009 S1), and massive rings

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." - Douglas Adams

Excellent thread and wonderful forum. As a user of Starry Night Pro Plus 7.5 and member of the Cloudy Nights forum, I am quite impressed with the program and the breadth of the knowledge available here Until we are able to create our own black hole engines to traverse interstellar space, programs like these are the best we can do to simulate it!

I wanted to make a contribution in terms of an exciting new discovery made in the creation of time crystals.

A time crystal or space-time crystal is an open system in non-equilibrium with its environment that exhibits time translation symmetry breaking (TTSB). It is impossible for a time crystal to be in equilibrium with its environment. The idea of a time crystal was first put forward by Nobel laureate and MIT professor Frank Wilczek in 2012.[a] Space-time crystals extend the ordinary three-dimensional symmetry seen in crystals to include the fourth dimension of time; a time crystal spontaneously breaks the symmetry of time translation. The crystal's pattern repeats not in space, but in time, which allows for the crystal to be in perpetual motion.[2] Time crystals are closely related to the concepts of zero-point energy and the dynamical Casimir effect.[b]

In 2016 Norman Yao and his colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, put forward a concrete proposal that would allow time crystals to be created in a laboratory environment.[c] Yao's blueprint was then used by two teams, a group led by Christopher Monroe at the University of Maryland[d] and a group led by Mikhail Lukin at Harvard University,[e] who were both able to successfully create a time crystal. Both experiments were published in the journal Nature in March 2017.[6]

Time crystals are thought to exhibit topological order,[7] an emergent phenomenon, in which nonlocal correlations encoded in the whole wave-function of a system allow for fault tolerance against perturbations, thus allowing quantum states to stabilize against decoherence effects that usually limit their useful lifetime. Preventing decoherence has a wide range of implications: The efficiency of some information theory and quantum thermodynamic tasks can be greatly enhanced when using quantum correlated states. It is also thought that time crystals could also give deeper understanding of the theory of time.[8]

Tonight begins the 10 night observing window during which the Event Horizon Telescope will attempt to image and resolve the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Here's wishing them the best of luck with the weather and the instrumentation for this historic observation!

To give an idea of what's involved with that, each night of observing will involve collecting several petabytes of data for each telescope in the array. Then these data must all be brought together and run through a supercomputer to actually extract an image using the principles of interferometry. The black hole is so small that no single telescope can see it, but the wavefronts of light arriving at each telescope arrive a little bit differently, and by correlating the data from multiple telescopes all across the world simultaneously, the image can be constructed as if from a single telescope the size of the Earth.

GJ 1132b - Detection of an atmosphere on a low mass, low temperature (below 1000K) Exoplanet 39 light years away from Earth, considered uninhabitable with 19 times as much solar radiation as Earth receives from the Sun. It was initially discovered (confirmed) on my Birthday, Nov 12th 2015

Semimajor axis of 2.3 million km away from a Red Dwarf M3.5 V starOrbital period and rotational period of both a 39 hour long year, and day.Radius is 1.375+/-0.16; Mass is 1.6 times that of EarthGiving it a range of a nearly rocky interior of around 70% Silicate and 30% Fe or a substantially H2O rich water-world.

Average surface temperature could be around 410 K (137 °C; 278 °F) The side facing the star is probably hotter than Venus. Atmosphere is mostly H2O and or CH4, detected with different infrared wavelengths. Most importantly the very common low mass Red Dwarf that it orbits has not blasted away the atmosphere over billions of years of solar flares. Which might mean thousands of other known Earth-sized exoplanets around Red Dwarfs are likely to have atmospheres too.

Source of the post Most importantly the very common low mass Red Dwarf that it orbits has not blasted away the atmosphere over billions of years of solar flares. Which might mean thousands of other known Earth-sized exoplanets around Red Dwarfs are likely to have atmospheres too.

Exciting! A lot of theoretical studies over the years have suggested that we can't easily exclude M-class stars from harboring habitable planets (indeed they might be the most common) and this observational result seems to weigh in that direction as well.